Wednesday, October 11, 2007: It had not rained in two days, therefore the heat rose. I slept "in" until 7:30 a.m. My grandparents caretaker, Hermana Manuela, was cooking breakfast already and Jesse was still sleeping. We ate fried bananas and fried chicken for breakfast. Everything is fried in the jungle, safer to eat I suppose. I don't remember if this is a morning sunrise or sunset in front of my grandparents house, either way I think it's beautiful.

It was too hot to do anything, so we cleaned the living room and then went to the store to get water. My grandmother told me that she knows we are healthy because we drink lots of water. I just didn't want to get dehydrated from sweating all the time.

Manuela was my grandparents caretaker but did not live with my grandparents. She had kids of her own so when her kids went off school in the morning, Manuel would come over and take care of my grandparents. Manuela's house was just down the street from my grandparents house. It was a "tropical" house, a roof made of interwoven palm tree branches, dirt floors and thin walls. It was a tiny house for her family of five....we sat there and talked for a little while, she introduced us to her son. Manuela told me she was going to send her daughters to talk with us later in the evening.

In the afternoon we went to buy my grandmother's favorite food, rotisserie chicken at the Kikiriki. We all had dinner together that night, I had been very careful with eating certain foods but I gave up and had some hand package sauces. I paid for that later....After dinner it was still terribly hot, so my cousin took Jesse for a motorcycle ride around the neighborhood.

When Jesse came back, Manuela's daughters had arrived to talk. Manuela knew we were youth workers back in the States so she wanted us to counsel her teenage daughters. At least in the Christian realm in Iquitos, people there have a certain respect towards Americans and their advice. I talked with the teenaged girls and encouraged them to keep going to church and study at school, but it was so difficult to have rapport with girls I had just met.

After our counseling session, I had the beginnings of a migraine so I took a migraine pill and we went to bed. It was so hot that day that we hardly wrote in our journal too.